I loved Everything Under so I went back to see whether the used shop in town had any other Daisy Johnson titles and god damnnnn this one also hits like a freight train
There was something about him. I think I told myself it was lust, a new sort of lust, consuming. There was something familiar about him, like I’d loved him before.
The places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as words, memory loss, nightmares. They are the way we sometimes wake with a pressure on our chests that is animal-like or turn on a light and see someone we'd thought was long gone standing there looking at us.
Everything Under, written by Daisy Johnson, is a retelling of Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex. It follows the story of Gretel, who was abandoned by her mother, Sarah, when she was sixteen. Sixteen years later, Sarah returns, suffering from Alzheimer's disease. As Gretel takes care of her mother, she tells Sarah about both of their lives. The novel was published in 2018 and was shortlisted for that year's Man Booker Award, losing to Anna Burns' Milkman.
When I initially heard of this book, I was given the information it was a mother/daughter story. And while I do ship the mother and daughter of this story, the canonical pairing is a mother/son couple. I also ship the brother and sister (the whole family has got very weird dynamics going on and is all very shippable).
A consideration: the sexual relationship is between a thirty-somethings-years-old woman and a sixteen-years-old boy. The encounter starts with him quite eager, but the he asks her to slow down, which she doesn't do. It might be triggering to some readers.
I would also like to address that one of the main characters is a transgender man. The book, when narrating his live before he transitioned, uses his deadname and female pronouns, and the characters who knew him from that time continue to refer to him by his deadname even after being informed he had transitioned. In this review, I won't mention his deadname, but when talking about his parent's memories of him, I'll use female pronouns and nouns, since his father only remembered him as a baby girl.
The story is told in a non linear format, which honestly, seems to be the ongoing trend in this blog. I swear it's not on purpose. Well, the chapters alternate between "The River", the far away past, which tells of Gretel's childhood living by the river with Sarah and also covers Marcus upbringing and the summer he met Gretel; "The Hunt", set is the near past, in which a thirty-year-olds Gretel searches for her mom and meet Marcus' parents, and "The Cottage", which is the novel's present day, after Sarah was found and moved into Gretel's cottage.
In chronological order, the story begins with Sarah, who, in her youth, was a party girl who liked to hook up with older man. Later, when she recounts her sexual escapades to Gretel, she mentions only one regret:
"There is one you speak about with slow regret. Younger, inexperienced, fumblingly nervous. A mistake from the start.
One day Sarah meets a fisherman named Charlie, who lives in a boathouse by the River Isis. They start dating and she moves in with him. When she's around thirty, she falls pregnant. She initially doesn't want any children, but decides to give it a chance since Charlie wants a baby. However, one day, Sarah leaves him, taking their baby girl with her.
In another town, near the river border, lives Laura and Roger, a couple who are unable to have children. One day, they find a infant by the river and decide to adopt that child. That child is Marcus, a transgender boy, who runs away at age sixteen after being told by their neighbour and friend, Fiona, that one day he would kill his father and have sex with his mother.
Marcus had been exploring his gender for a while (when he and Fiona, who is a trans woman, were alone, he would ask her to draw him a moustache and was always interested in the idea that you didn't have to identify with the gender you were assigned at birth) but had never publicly told his parents anything about it, so that may be why Laura and Roger continue to refer to him by his deadname even years later, when Gretel tells them that their child was a boy.
Anyway, after running away, Marcus begins to camp by the river shore, where he listens to the myth of the canal thief, a thief who robbed boats and killed animals during the night. He becomes very terrified of this thief and is initially cautious when he meets a blind fisherman named Charlie (yes, the same one who dated Sarah), but grows to trust Charlie and camps near his boat. Charlie tells Marcus about his daughter, who was taken away by her mother and whom he had been searching for a long time. Since Charlie is blind, he assumes Marcus to be a boy and starts calling him "son", which Marcus quite enjoys and is probably helped him realize he identified as a boy.
One night, Marcus wakes up scared by loud thundering noises. He goes into the boat to talk to Charlie, but Charlie, who is blind, mistakes him for the canal thief and attacks him. In self defence, Marcus hits Charlie in the head with tent pegs, killing him. After dumping Charlie's body in the river, Marcus runs off again. He decides to change his appearance and cuts off his long hair, tries to 'thicken' his facial hair by shaving in hopes it grows back darker, binds his breats with plastic wrap and adopts a more masculine posture.
As he keeps following the river's course, he runs into thirteen-years-old Gretel, who lives in a boat with her mom. Gretel grew up very isolated, having even created her own language with her mother, whom she idolatrised, despite their very volatile relationship.
"We were the kings of that place. We did whatever we wanted. You were a small deity, a quiet god. No wonder we were able to bring about what we did."
For a couple of days, Gretel visits Marcus, and they play together as she tells him about her mom, mixing the truth and tall tales (such as saying that her mom was a mermaid. Which calls to mind Infanduous, in which the MC also compares her mother to a mermaid).
"He was in love with Sarah before he even met her."
Sarah takes pity on Marcus who is all alone and tells Gretel to invite him to their boat. I think she assumes Marcus to be older than just a teenager, for she offers him cigarettes. Gretel and Sarah tell him of the Bonak, which is anything they fear. The current Bonak is a creature who lives in the river and Gretel is trying to capture it with traps. He dines with them and sets up his tent near where their boat is moored.
"He had never met anyone like her bofere. He felt as if maybe they were joined tgether in a way he did not understand. He wished he had never seen her; he wished he could see her every day there was left to him."
Indeed, they re connected, Marcus just doesn't knows it yet.
The next morning, Marcus accidentally catches Sarah washing naked by the river and can't take his eyes off her. She notices him staring and he runs away in shame. Sarah, however, doesn't say anything. He spends more days at the boat, Sarah teaching him how to preserve meat and how to fish. Other boats pass by warning them that there's something dangerous in the river. Marcus interest in Sarah only deepens.
"He would do whatever she asked him to. If she asked him to go under the water and never come back he would. He told himself that it was a debt of gratitute for all she'd dome but he already knew it was more than that."
One night, after Gretel has gone to sleep, Marcus and Sarah, both a little wine drunk, get closer, with him laying his head on her lap and her carresing his hair. She also asks him to search her breats for a tumor (which, as we learn from the present day narration, Sarah eventually had to have removed). She also urges him to leave, saying things are getting dangerous around the river. Marcus refuses to leave, even when, in the next day, he thinks he saw the Bonak.
"He understood it was his choice to go and that she would not tell him to. He understood - also - that he couldnt`t leave More than that: he couldn't ever leave her."
Now certain that there was something large lurking in the water, the trio makes a huge trap with the indent to catch and kill the creature.
Marcus had been staying the them for almost a month when it happens. One night, Sarah tells Gretel to sleep on the roof of the boat, because Sarah needs some alone time and she also needs to talk to Marcus in private. There's not much talking: Marcus climbs into Sarah bed, where she's naked under the blankets. She unbuttons his shirt and at first he is happy: "This is what I'm here for". But then he starts to panic thinking back to the words Fiona had told him.
He asks Sarah to stop, to slow down, but she keeps undressing him. She removes his binder and kisses his nipple. She touches him, touches herself, grinds on him and finally puts her mouth between his legs.
Not gonna lie, I didn't expect that to be what happened. The sex scene is described almost in the end of the book, after having been teased for a while. And nowhere did I see it coming that Sarah would rape Marcus. Specially because when I read reviews for the book, people were disgusted by the incest, not the rape or the pedophilia (let's be honest, even if Marcus had been 100% agreeing to the act, it would still be statutory rape).
The next day, Marcus, Sarah and Gretel set a scheadule to keep watch for the Bonak taking shifts so one would always be awake. During Marcus' shift, he hears a cage door slamming and goes to check the trap. As he swims to where it is, the sudden realzation hit hi: he has done what Fiona prophetized. Charlie and Sarah were his parents. I won't pretend to undertand how he realized it, but he did. You know the biggest sadnessall this? Chalie had found the child he had spent sixteen years looking for, but never realised it. He found his child only to attack him and be killing in self defense.
He discoveres that the cage door had been closed by the wind and goes to return to the boat, but his feet (he has a limp in the left leg) falters and he drowns, beng taken by the river to never be seen again. As he is drowning, he is certain he can see Sarah watching.
As soon as dawn comes over, Sarah moves the boat teling Gretel that Marcus would follow them shortly, only that he never knows. They leave the river for good and settle in a aparment above a horse stable. Gretel enrolls in school after having always been homeschool. She doesn't fit in, much like how Marcus never did. As she grows, she finds herself thinking of him, specially when she was kissing others.
"Somewhere in the kissing I started seeing Marcus, emerging out of the centre of their chests like he'd been waiting in there all along."
When Gretel is sixteen, Sarah tries to tell her something about Marcus, but Gretel says she doesn't wants to know. That same day, Sarah leaves and never comes back.
At first, Gretel tries to search for Sarah, but she eventually gives up. She graduates college. Becomes a lexicographer. From time to time, she calls to hospital or morgues and gives a description of Sarah, to see if Sarah wound up somewhere. One day, the description fits a body that lays unidentified in a morgue nearby.
Gretel goes to see it and discovers it's not Sarah, but she finds herself nable to stop her search just then, not when she had basically thought it had been over. Since she can't find any record of Sarah, she decides to look for Marcus. She doesn't find him, but finds a couple with the same last name living near where she lived when she had met Marcus.
She visits Roger and Laura, tell them about Marcus. They say they don't have a missing son, but that they had a daughter who fitted the desription of the limping leg. And so Gretel unveils the start of Marcus' story. She also meets Fiona, who tells her of the prophecy she had told Marcus before he ran away.
"I told her about [...] falling in love with Marcus in a childlike way, devoted, uncaring."
While she's staying in Roger's house, she gets a call from Sarah, asking her to go and get her. Gretel does back to the river where she spent her childhood and finds Sarah. Sarah is clearly not in a good state. She has lost a breast due to cancer and has missing memories, not seeming to notice that time has passed. However, she does eventually acepts that Gretel is who she says she is.
They talk and Sarah asks if Gretel remembers the first boat, the first baby. She doesn't, she hadn't been born yet, but Sarah tells her anyway. Of Charlie, of the baby she had with him, a baby they had named Gretel. A baby she had abandoned in a trash can by the river. Of how she lived alone in a boat after that, men coming and going. Until one day she found herself pregnant again. She named the new baby after the old one, which she believed to have died.
Having already heard from Roger of how he had found Marcus, Gretel puts the pieces together. She takes Sarah to her home, where Sarah deteriorated little by little. "The Cottage" sections are filled with Gretel resentment towards Sarah, but also with love. Gretel addresses her mom with an devotion that's more than filial love.
"Except, cut wrong side into my skin are not canals and tran tracks and a boat, but always: you."
"You populaed me: you ran the spirals of my thinking. I went to work, sat at the same desk every day, [...] dreamed of your mouth moving around words I could no longer hear."
Gretel takes care of Sarah and writes their story, writes what Sarah tells her, what she finds out. One day, Sarah tells her:
"I should have known when he first came . [...] There was something about him. I think I told myself it was lust, a new sort of lust, consuming. There was something familiar bout him, like Id loved him before. I should have known."
Which is sooooo GSA of her. (If you don`t know what GSA is, check it please, I promise you will like it.)
I'm not sure if Sarah knew who Marcus truly was before Gretel told her. I'm not sure how Marcus found out. Maybe he didn't knew for sure, he was just trying to make the prophecy match his actions had happened to be right. Either way, it was what it was.
One afternoon, Gretel calls for Sarah and she doesn't come. Then she finds her mother hanging from some bedsheets, having killed herself. Was it for her ever worsening mental condition? For regret over Marcus? We will never know. Gretel tries to live on the best she can to let the memory of Sarah go away.
Overall, I really liked the book. Johnson is a magnific writter (I found out she has a book called Sisters, which I need to get, because I think it will be very incestuous). The way she writes about loss and pain is beautiful. If you liked poetic books, I couldn't recommend this one more. Even if the incest isn't your cup of tea, it's still a worthy read.
I have been thinking about the trace of our memories, whether the trace stays the same or changes as we rewrite them over time. If they are stable as houses and cliffs or decay fast and are replaced, overlaid. Everything we remember is passed down, thought over, is never the way it was in reality. It makes me fraught, restless. I will never really know what happened.
